10/8/2015

TheSlowDeathoftheUniversityTheChronicleofHigherEducation

THE CHRONICLE REVIEW

The Slow Death of the University

By Terry Eagleton

APRIL 06, 2015

few years ago, I was being shown

around a large, very
technologically advanced

university in Asia by its proud president. As

Chronicle Review photo illustration by Ron
Coddington, original image by De Agostini,
Getty Images

befitted so eminent a personage, he was

flanked by two burly young minders in
black suits and shades, who for all I knew
were carrying Kalashnikovs under their

jackets. Having waxed lyrical about his gleaming new business school and
state-of-the-art institute for management studies, the president paused to
permit me a few words of fulsome praise. I remarked instead that there seemed
to be no critical studies of any kind on his campus. He looked at me
bemusedly, as though I had asked him how many Ph.D.s in pole dancing they
awarded each year, and replied rather stiffly "Your comment will be noted." He
then took a small piece of cutting-edge technology out of his pocket, flicked it
open and spoke a few curt words of Korean into it, probably "Kill him." A
limousine the length of a cricket pitch then arrived, into which the president
was bundled by his minders and swept away. I watched his car disappear from
view, wondering when his order for my execution was to be implemented.
Deconstructing Academe
Colleges claim theyre the last hope for revitalization. But can they really revive
struggling towns and cities?

The False Promise of 'Practical' Education

http://chronicle.com/article/TheSlowDeathofthe/228991/

1/10

10/8/2015

TheSlowDeathoftheUniversityTheChronicleofHigherEducation

The False Promise of 'Practical' Education

Today's calls for pragmatic education are at odds with the idea's history.

This happened in South Korea, but it might have taken place almost anywhere
on the planet. From Cape Town to Reykjavik, Sydney to So Paulo, an event as
momentous in its own way as the Cuban revolution or the invasion of Iraq is
steadily under way: the slow death of the university as a center of humane
critique. Universities, which in Britain have an 800-year history, have
traditionally been derided as ivory towers, and there was always some truth in
the accusation. Yet the distance they established between themselves and
society at large could prove enabling as well as disabling, allowing them to
reflect on the values, goals, and interests of a social order too frenetically
bound up in its own short-term practical pursuits to be capable of much selfcriticism. Across the globe, that critical distance is now being diminished
almost to nothing, as the institutions that produced Erasmus and John Milton,
Einstein and Monty Python, capitulate to the hard-faced priorities of global
capitalism.
Much of this will be familiar to an American readership. Stanford and MIT,
after all, provided the very models of the entrepreneurial university. What has
emerged in Britain, however, is what one might call Americanization without
the affluence the affluence, at least, of the American private educational
sector.
This is even becoming true at those traditional finishing schools for the English
gentry, Oxford and Cambridge, whose colleges have always been insulated to
some extent against broader economic forces by centuries of lavish
endowments. Some years ago, I resigned from a chair at the University of
Oxford (an event almost as rare as an earthquake in Edinburgh) when I became
aware that I was expected in some respects to behave less as a scholar than a
CEO.

http://chronicle.com/article/TheSlowDeathofthe/228991/

2/10

10/8/2015

TheSlowDeathoftheUniversityTheChronicleofHigherEducation

When I first came to Oxford 30 years earlier, any such professionalism would
have been greeted with patrician disdain. Those of my colleagues who had
actually bothered to finish their Ph.D.s would sometimes use the title of "Mr."
rather than "Dr.," since "Dr." suggested a degree of ungentlemanly labor.
Publishing books was regarded as a rather vulgar project. A brief article every
10 years or so on the syntax of Portuguese or the dietary habits of ancient
Carthage was considered just about permissible. There had been a time earlier
when college tutors might not even have bothered to arrange set tutorial times
for their undergraduates. Instead, the undergraduate would simply drop round
to their rooms when the spirit moved him for a glass of sherry and a civilized
chat about Jane Austen or the function of the pancreas.
Today, Oxbridge retains much of its collegial ethos. It is the dons who decide
how to invest the colleges money, what flowers to plant in their gardens,
whose portraits to hang in the senior common room, and how best to explain
to their students why they spend more on the wine cellar than on the college
library. All important decisions are made by the fellows of the college in full
session, and everything from financial and academic affairs to routine
administration is conducted by elected committees of academics responsible
to the body of fellows as a whole. In recent years, this admirable system of selfgovernment has had to confront a number of centralizing challenges from the
university, of the kind that led to my own exit from the place; but by and large
it has stood firm. Precisely because Oxbridge colleges are for the most part
premodern institutions, they have a smallness of scale about them that can
serve as a model of decentralized democracy, and this despite the odious
privileges they continue to enjoy.
Elsewhere in Britain, the situation is far different. Instead of government by
academics there is rule by hierarchy, a good deal of Byzantine bureaucracy,
junior professors who are little but dogsbodies, and vice chancellors who
behave as though they are running General Motors. Senior professors are now
senior managers, and the air is thick with talk of auditing and accountancy.
http://chronicle.com/article/TheSlowDeathofthe/228991/

3/10

10/8/2015

TheSlowDeathoftheUniversityTheChronicleofHigherEducation

Books those troglodytic, drearily pretechnological phenomena are

increasingly frowned upon. At least one British university has restricted the
number of bookshelves professors may have in their offices in order to
discourage "personal libraries." Wastepaper baskets are becoming as rare as
Tea Party intellectuals, since paper is now pass.
Philistine administrators plaster the campus with
mindless logos and issue their edicts in barbarous,
semiliterate prose. One Northern Irish vice
chancellor commandeered the only public room
left on campus, a common room shared by staff and
students alike, for a private dining room in which he
could entertain local bigwigs and entrepreneurs.
When the students occupied the room in protest, he
ordered his security guards to smash the only
restroom near to hand. British vice chancellors have
been destroying their own universities for years, but
rarely as literally as that. On the same campus,
security staff move students on if they are found
hanging around. The ideal would be a university
without these disheveled, unpredictable creatures.
In the midst of this debacle, it is the humanities

Teaching has
for some time
been a less
vital business
in British
universities
than research.
It is research
that brings in
the money,
not courses on
Expressionism
or the
Reformation.

above all that are being pushed to the wall. The

British state continues to distribute grants to its universities for science,
medicine, engineering, and the like, but it has ceased to hand out any
significant resources to the arts. It is not out of the question that if this does not
change, whole humanities departments will be closed down in the coming
years. If English departments survive at all, it may simply be to teach business
students the use of the semicolon, which was not quite what Northrop Frye
and Lionel Trilling had in mind.

http://chronicle.com/article/TheSlowDeathofthe/228991/

4/10

10/8/2015

TheSlowDeathoftheUniversityTheChronicleofHigherEducation

Humanities departments must now support themselves mainly by the tuition

fees they receive from their students, which means that smaller institutions
that rely almost entirely on this source of income have been effectively
privatized through the back door. The private university, which Britain has
rightly resisted for so long, is creeping ever closer. Yet the government of Prime
Minister David Cameron has also overseen a huge hike in tuitions, which
means that students, dependent on loans and encumbered with debt, are
understandably demanding high standards of teaching and more personal
treatment in return for their cash at just the moment when humanities
departments are being starved of funds.
Besides, teaching has been for some time a less vital business in British
universities than research. It is research that brings in the money, not courses
on Expressionism or the Reformation. Every few years, the British state carries
out a thorough inspection of every university in the land, measuring the
research output of each department in painstaking detail. It is on this basis that
government grants are awarded. There has thus been less incentive for
academics to devote themselves to their teaching, and plenty of reason for
them to produce for productions sake, churning out supremely pointless
articles, starting up superfluous journals online, dutifully applying for outside
research grants regardless of whether they really need them, and passing the
odd pleasant hour padding their CVs.
In any case, the vast increase in bureaucracy in British higher education,
occasioned by the flourishing of a managerial ideology and the relentless
demands of the state assessment exercise, means that academics have had
little enough time to prepare their teaching even if it seemed worth doing,
which for the past several years it has not. Points are awarded by the state
inspectors for articles with a bristling thicket of footnotes, but few if any for a
best-selling textbook aimed at students and general readers. Academics are
most likely to boost their institutions status by taking temporary leave of it,
taking time off from teaching to further their research.
http://chronicle.com/article/TheSlowDeathofthe/228991/

5/10

10/8/2015

TheSlowDeathoftheUniversityTheChronicleofHigherEducation

They would boost its resources even more were they to abandon academe
altogether and join a circus, hence saving their financial masters a much
grudged salary and allowing the bureaucrats to spread out their work among
an already overburdened professoriate. Many academics in Britain are aware
of just how passionately their institution would love to see the back of them,
apart from a few household names who are able to pull in plenty of customers.
There is, in fact, no shortage of lecturers seeking to take early retirement, given
that British academe was an agreeable place to work some decades ago and is
now a deeply unpleasant one for many of its employees. In an additional twist
of the knife, however, they are now about to have their pensions cut as well.

s professors are transformed into managers, so students are

converted into consumers. Universities fall over one another in an
undignified scramble to secure their fees. Once such customers are

safely within the gates, there is pressure on their professors not to fail them,
and thus risk losing their fees. The general idea is that if the student fails, it is
the professors fault, rather like a hospital in which every death is laid at the
door of the medical staff. One result of this hot pursuit of the student purse is
the growth of courses tailored to whatever is currently in fashion among 20year-olds. In my own discipline of English, that means vampires rather than
Victorians, sexuality rather than Shelley, fanzines rather than Foucault, the
contemporary world rather than the medieval one. It is thus that deep-seated
political and economic forces come to shape syllabuses. Any English
department that focused its energies on Anglo-Saxon literature or the 18th
century would be cutting its own throat.
Hungry for their fees, some British universities are now allowing students with
undistinguished undergraduate degrees to proceed to graduate courses, while
overseas students (who are generally forced to pay through the nose) may find
themselves beginning a doctorate in English with an uncertain command of
the language. Having long despised creative writing as a vulgar American
pursuit, English departments are now desperate to hire some minor novelist or
http://chronicle.com/article/TheSlowDeathofthe/228991/

6/10

10/8/2015

TheSlowDeathoftheUniversityTheChronicleofHigherEducation

failing poet in order to attract the scribbling hordes of potential Pynchons,

ripping off their fees in full, cynical knowledge that the chances of getting ones
first novel or volume of poetry past a London publisher are probably less than
the chances of awakening to discover that you have been turned into a giant
beetle.
Education should indeed be responsive to the needs of society. But this is not
the same as regarding yourself as a service station for neocapitalism. In fact,
you would tackle societys needs a great deal more effectively were you to
challenge this whole alienated model of learning. Medieval universities served
the wider society superbly well, but they did so by producing pastors, lawyers,
theologians, and administrative officials who helped to sustain church and
state, not by frowning upon any form of intellectual activity that might fail to
turn a quick buck.
Times, however, have changed. According to the British state, all publicly
funded academic research must now regard itself as part of the so-called
knowledge economy, with a measurable impact on society. Such impact is
rather easier to gauge for aeronautical engineers than ancient historians.
Pharmacists are likely to do better at this game than phenomenologists.
Subjects that do not attract lucrative research grants from private industry, or
that are unlikely to pull in large numbers of students, are plunged into a state
of chronic crisis. Academic merit is equated with how much money you can
raise, while an educated student is redefined as an employable one. It is not a
good time to be a paleographer or numismatist, pursuits that we will soon not
even be able to spell, let alone practice.
The effects of this sidelining of the humanities can be felt all the way down the
educational system in the secondary schools, where modern languages are in
precipitous decline, history really means modern history, and the teaching of

http://chronicle.com/article/TheSlowDeathofthe/228991/

7/10

10/8/2015

TheSlowDeathoftheUniversityTheChronicleofHigherEducation

the classics is largely confined to private institutions such as Eton College. (It is
thus that the old Etonian Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, regularly lards
his public declarations with tags from Horace.)
It is true that philosophers could always set up meaning-of-life clinics on street
corners, or modern linguists station themselves at strategic public places
where a spot of translation might be required. In general, the idea is that
universities must justify their existence by acting as ancillaries to
entrepreneurship. As one government report chillingly put it, they should
operate as "consultancy organisations." In fact, they themselves have become
profitable industries, running hotels, concerts, sporting events, catering
facilities, and so on.

f the humanities in Britain are withering on the branch, it is largely

because they are being driven by capitalist forces while being
simultaneously starved of resources. (British higher education lacks the

philanthropic tradition of the United States, largely because America has a

great many more millionaires than Britain.) We are also speaking of a society in
which, unlike the United States, higher education has not traditionally been
treated as a commodity to be bought and sold. Indeed, it is probably the
conviction of the majority of college students in Britain today that higher
education should be provided free of charge, as it is in Scotland; and though
there is an obvious degree of self-interest in this opinion, there is a fair amount
of justice in it as well. Educating the young, like protecting them from serial
killers, should be regarded as a social responsibility, not as a matter of profit.
I myself, as the recipient of a state scholarship, spent seven years as a student
at Cambridge without paying a bean for it. It is true that as a result of this
slavish reliance on the state at an impressionable age I have grown spineless
and demoralized, unable to stand on my own two feet or protect my family
with a shotgun if called upon to do so. In a craven act of state dependency, I
have even been known to call upon the services of the local fire department
http://chronicle.com/article/TheSlowDeathofthe/228991/

8/10

10/8/2015

TheSlowDeathoftheUniversityTheChronicleofHigherEducation

from time to time, rather than beat out the blaze with my own horny hands. I
am, even so, willing to trade any amount of virile independence for seven free
years at Cambridge.
It is true that only about 5 percent of the British population attended university
in my own student days, and there are those who claim that today, when that
figure has risen to around 50 percent, such liberality of spirit is no longer
affordable. Yet Germany, to name only one example, provides free education to
its sizable student population. A British government that was serious about
lifting the crippling debt from the shoulders of the younger generation could
do so by raising taxes on the obscenely rich and recovering the billions lost
each year in evasion.
It would also seek to restore the honorable lineage of the university as one of
the few arenas in modern society (another is the arts) in which prevailing
ideologies can be submitted to some rigorous scrutiny. What if the value of the
humanities lies not in the way they conform to such dominant notions, but in
the fact that they dont? There is no value in integration as such. In premodern
times, artists were more thoroughly integrated into society at large than they
have been in the modern era, but part of what that meant was that they were
quite often ideologues, agents of political power, mouthpieces for the status
quo. The modern artist, by contrast, has no such secure niche in the social
order, but it is precisely on this account that he or she refuses to take its pieties
for granted.
Until a better system emerges, however, I myself have decided to throw in my
lot with the hard-faced philistines and crass purveyors of utility. Somewhat to
my shame, I have now taken to asking my graduate students at the beginning
of a session whether they can afford my very finest insights into literary works,
or whether they will have to make do with some serviceable but less
scintillating comments.

http://chronicle.com/article/TheSlowDeathofthe/228991/

9/10

10/8/2015

TheSlowDeathoftheUniversityTheChronicleofHigherEducation

Charging by the insight is a distasteful affair, and perhaps not the most
effective way of establishing amicable relations with ones students; but it
seems a logical consequence of the current academic climate. To those who
complain that this is to create invidious distinctions among ones students, I
should point out that those who are not able to hand over cash for my most
perceptive analyses are perfectly free to engage in barter. Freshly baked pies,
kegs of home-brewed beer, knitted sweaters, and stout, handmade shoes: All
these are eminently acceptable. There are, after all, more things in life than
money.

Terry Eagleton is a distinguished visiting professor of English literature at the

University of Lancaster. He is the author of some 50 books, including How to
Read Literature (Yale University Press, 2013).

Copyright 2015 The Chronicle of Higher Education

http://chronicle.com/article/TheSlowDeathofthe/228991/

10/10